Hanging God at Auschwitz: the necessity of a solitary encounter with the other as the genesis of Levinasian ethics.

Loumansky, Amanda ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4950-1207 (2009) Hanging God at Auschwitz: the necessity of a solitary encounter with the other as the genesis of Levinasian ethics. Contemporary political theory, 8 (1) . pp. 23-43. ISSN 1470-8914 [Article] (doi:10.1057/cpt.2008.47)

Abstract

This paper is a response to Fagan's argument that Levinas's attempt to build an ethics, separated from politics, is misconceived. I take issue with her claim that the separation is untenable because the Third is always present in the encounter with the Other. I maintain that this conclusion fails to appreciate Levinas's attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions in his greatest work, Otherwise than Being. My approach, consciously in the Levinasian tradition, is elliptical in the sense that I seek not simply to explain why her thesis is a misreading of his thinking but to demonstrate why the separation of ethics from politics is essential to it. Levinas's quest for an unproblematized ethics is a response to the collapse of belief in a transcendental deity, an inevitable outcome of the Shoah, and leads him to locate the divine in the face of the Other. This has to be a solitary encounter, a dyadic relation of Self to the Other, as the pre-cognitive genesis of ethics that accords precedence of the Good over the classical philosophical obsession with the True.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Statistics

DownloadsShow export options

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Activity Overview

6 month trend

0Downloads

6 month trend

444Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.